An Atlanta lawyer who repeatedly cited phony legal cases in her client’s divorce has been penalized by Georgia Court of Appeals judges who say she appears to have used artificial intelligence to craft her arguments.
Diana Lynch was hit Monday with a $2,500 penalty in the appeal of an order in her client’s divorce case. The order, signed in May 2024 by a DeKalb County judge, appears to have been prepared by Lynch and references two cases that don’t exist, according to a three-judge appeals court panel.
The judges said Lynch was not deterred when accused by her client’s ex-wife of making up case references and filed a response citing 11 cases that are either fake or irrelevant.
“The irregularities in these filings suggest that they were drafted using generative AI,” the judges wrote in an opinion. “We are troubled by the citation of bogus cases in the trial court’s order.”
Lynch did not immediately respond to phone and email inquiries about the ruling. She was admitted to practice law in Georgia in 1995 and operates as a solo practitioner in Stone Mountain, according to State Bar of Georgia records.
The judges said it might be the first time a Georgia appeals court has confronted the problems that can flow from a lawyer’s apparent use of artificial intelligence that generates content. They said other courts have tackled the issue.
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts warned in his 2023 report on the judiciary that commonly used AI applications can be prone to “hallucinations,” causing lawyers to submit briefs citing fake cases, the Georgia judges said.
They said Lynch’s use of fictitious cases and citations in support of her client, a husband who filed for divorce in 2022, has deprived his ex-wife of the opportunity to appropriately respond.
The case record shows Lynch’s client filed for divorce in April 2022 in DeKalb County and received a divorce decree in July of that year. In October 2023, his ex-wife asked the county judge to reopen the case and set aside the divorce decree, claiming she had moved to Texas in 2021 and had not been properly served with the complaint.
DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Yolanda Parker-Smith denied the ex-wife’s request in a three-page order in May 2024.
In the ex-wife’s appeal, she pointed out the trial judge relied on two fake cases in the order, rendering it void.
The appellate judges said the order signed by Parker-Smith appears to have been prepared by Lynch, who cited the same two fictitious cases, among others, in her subsequent case filings.
They said Lynch added insult to injury by requesting attorney fees in relation to the ex-wife’s appeal and even used a phony case to support the request.
“We cannot find the cited case, Johnson v. Johnson, either by case name or citation,” the judges said. “And, not surprisingly, we could not locate the case by its purported holding, which is a blatant misstatement of the law.”
The judges imposed the maximum penalty on Lynch for her “frivolous” bid for attorney fees. They sent the case back to the DeKalb County judge to reconsider the ex-wife’s request to set aside the divorce decree.
Their opinion references a study by Stanford researchers, who found generative AI models, including ChatGPT, “hallucinate” around 75% of the time when answering questions about a court’s core ruling.
Filings in a consumer credit case pending before a federal judge in Atlanta show the plaintiff’s lawyer was recently asked to explain their written references to a case and a quotation that the judge could not find.
The lawyer, Naja Hawk, acknowledged in a June 26 response that she could not locate the referenced case or verify the citation and withdrew her reliance on them, saying they must have been included in error.
The impact of artificial intelligence on Georgia’s courts is being assessed by a judicial committee chaired by Georgia Supreme Court Justice Andrew Pinson and assisted by the National Center for State Courts.
The committee is tasked with forming recommendations to help maintain public trust and confidence in the state’s judicial system as the use of artificial intelligence increases.
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